


make a little lighthouse in your soul

by WolfSpider



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, F/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 03:59:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18275321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfSpider/pseuds/WolfSpider
Summary: Vanya was exceptionally lucky to know all along who her soulmate was, until she wasn't.





	make a little lighthouse in your soul

**Author's Note:**

> For another umbrellakink prompt, nominally: "Vanya finds it sad that even in a world where everyone has a soulmate, an other half made perfectly for you, hers is one who can time travel. She might as well have been born without a soul mark. When Five returns, there's some complicated feelings."
> 
> Title is a play on a lyric from "Birdhouse in Your Soul" by They Might Be Giants.

For seventeen years, before Allison packed up overnight and left before dawn without saying goodbye, their father had been engaged in a conspiracy to keep her and her soulmate apart. Reginald Hargreeves had very particular opinions about the proper care and raising of children, which hadn’t been influenced one whit by any number of studies about early childhood socialization or the positive influence of soulmates on cognitive development or any other such sentimental hogwash. Their primary caretakers from birth to adolescent independence had been a monkey and a mother literally made out of wire.

So when Allison unclasped the necklace that made a more transient mark of allegiance than Luther’s initials stencilled ineffably over her heart and hung it on a slender metal tree beside the emptied makeup box on her vanity and set out alone, well-- it was no more a separation than had already been imposed on them through years of Father glowering out of the shadows, ready to rap knuckles for hands caught being held, withhold indulgent privileges such as dinner for stolen kisses.

Vanya, meanwhile, hadn’t needed stern paternal disapproval to separate her from her soulmate.

He’d done that all by himself.

\---

The day Five disappeared he’d taken with him a pocket knife and the clothes on his back and an ego bigger than the moon, and all the confidence they had to share between them. There were a lot of stories people told about soulmates, Vanya would come to find out later, but the one that Grace had told them with soft breathless reverence when they’d been old enough to pick at the lettering branding and blemishing their skin and put _A.H. + L.H._ together was one of the oldest, the Platonic ideal of it: that once upon a time every human person had been born with two heads and four arms and twenty toes, and the power of a perfectly unified soul had so scared whatever powers were at work in the universe that from then on every soul had been split down the middle, yearning to return to its other half. It was awfully comforting, on one hand, to know that you were never truly alone in the universe-- that even if it took you most of your life to meet them, there was someone waiting for you out there. And how lucky, that Vanya had been delivered straight to hers across continents and a great shining ocean, that there had never been any mystery in it.

Five had been marvelous from the beginning, but that was the problem, wasn’t it. Their soul, if that was what it was, hadn’t been split evenly; like a pair of cheap balsa wood chopsticks that snapped into uneven splinters on the fat ends, Five had gotten all their combined charm and self-confidence, all the cockiness, the mathematical genius, the _power_ , everything that might have made them special. And then he’d taken it with him when he’d left, leaving Vanya small and mousy and drab, hollowed out and bereft, stumbling dazed and half concussed through a world that seemed washed clean of wonder.

It hadn’t occurred to her for another three years after Allison left that she could too, follow in the footsteps of everyone who might have loved her in that palatial tomb of a house and just walk right out. If Luther or Mom or their father had noticed or cared, there had been only radio silence for all the years between the exodus and the publication of The Book, and no one had made even the pretense of trying to stop her. Vanya had left a light on for Five in the kitchen every night right up until the night she left, in the kitchen and in her heart to guide him in safely home, but she started eating the sandwiches herself. You had to know which parts of the ritual were for you, and which parts were just for the tradition of it.

That first night on her own Vanya had taken what little money she’d scraped together and used it to rent herself a room in a seedy, water-stained motel where the rooms smelled like mold in the walls and every surface felt strangely sticky. She drew the blackout curtains across the windows that looked out over the empty parking lot and the humming neon Vacancy sign and turned out all the lights, lay on top of the slick green comforter still in her clothes and fed a quarter into the Magic Fingers machine in the hopes that the rumbling, jittery quake of it would smooth out her nerves.

It worked well enough, but past the initial burn of anxiety at stepping outside her bounds Vanya felt nothing, and the nothing went down a long way: not triumph or elation or relief or hope, just hollowed out inside, flat and blank like the back of a plastic Halloween mask. When _Vanya_ had left the Hargreeves house, she’d taken a suitcase full of pressed white uniform shirts (and promised herself she’d never wear a skirt again, voluntarily or otherwise) and her father’s violin and, on the way out, plucked from its display case impulsively at the same moment, the limited edition collector’s figurine of Number Five. She held him in her hand now, small and all stiff, blunt edges, and ran the pad of her thumb over his modeled face, feeling the outline of his nose, the domino mask, his hair fixed forever in perfect coif.

So many nights she’d lay awake in her own familiar bed like this, watching the ceiling and thinking of Five, a longing for touch that she could no longer even conceive of. At thirteen, when she’d still held out the pretense of hope, it had seemed appropriate to transfer the memory of his small hand in hers to his hand on her breast through her bra or palming over the downy smooth plane of her belly, just innocent adolescent fantasies of exploration-- at twenty, remembering him as she’d known him became perversely inappropriate, and no older effigy her lonely mind could conjure felt correct enough to be worth bothering. It was impossible to know what Five’s hands would have felt like, fingers threaded through hers or sunk possessive into the skin of her hips, dug down against the flare of bone. Impossible to know what his voice would have sounded like, deeper and real and contentedly calling her name, naming her as they’d named each other.

Instead Vanya spread out on top of the bed, limbs askew like a corpse tumbled from the top of a tall building as though she were about to start making snow angels in the down comforter and told herself she enjoyed the silence. It was _her_ silence now, bought and paid for, not the cavernous quiet of a sad empty house.

She could make a home for herself in her own heart, and that was just fine.

\---

Allison got married in a church the Vatican would have been ashamed of, and then afterward they all retired to the city’s fanciest convention venue for a reception the wedding planners rolled out a literal red carpet for. Vanya shared a cab between locations with a gaggle of Allison’s personal assistants crammed in the back like an overstuffed clown car, and when they finally arrived was struck by a dizzying sense of deja vu to be on the sidelines again, blinking in dull discomfort as flashbulbs went off all around aimed at her brothers and sister. At Allison, handsome in a wedding dress that sparkled with the morning dew of diamonds, throwing light like a mirror ball.

Vanya, in her nicest but still rumpled suit, felt grubby and dingy and out of place as she slunk from the car to the wide double doors, hoping impossibly that no one would notice her. She didn’t belong on a promenade in front of slavering reporters, Dad had always been extremely clear about that; nothing special about her, nothing worth a second look or anyone’s time. Being in the line of sight in so unlovely a look, profoundly ordinary, made her want to apologize to everyone for existing and daring to attend the festivities of her sister’s big day.

With the weight of all those cameras around her, Vanya rubbed compulsively at the empty inside of her wrist. At times like this she missed Five most of all, her special opposite number; Five wouldn’t have been intimidated by the lavish event or the media attention. Five would have puffed out his chest and put his chin up, self-satisfied and assured that the attention was warranted, and he would have put an arm loose around her waist and swept her along with him, lending her some of his determination. Even at thirteen, Five had always belonged right wherever he was-- which was no longer in the space by her side, and hadn’t been for a long while.

Seven years and six months at that point, but who was counting?

Allison was absent from her numbered seat at the family table for most of the dinner, busy swanning around the room on the arm of her new husband, radiant in twinkling happiness-- which meant that the rest of them sort of just sat there, trapped on their four-course island, isolated by virtue of not knowing any other guests but each other. Diego’s seat was empty and Klaus’ was empty about half the time as he too flitted from table to table, plucking extra canapes off of minor celebrities’ silver plates when their attention was elsewhere and filling his pockets with spare forks and knives. There was an empty place for Five beside her as there had been at every family dinner since he disappeared, like setting a plate for Elijah. Luther’s tie was untucked.

They sat across from each other and sipped champagne from a bottle that had probably cost more than anything Vanya owned and the lingering silence took on a flat and desperate quality; Vanya and Luther had never had much to say to each other, but there was a piquant sort of shared melancholy to that moment. She watched his face as he watched Allison with Patrick, saw it crumple in the instant he finally accepted it was over, it was done, she’d chosen someone else-- leaving him a big, slow, simple man, on his own with no one to guide him except their father. Who also hadn’t shown up, supposing he’d even been invited.

“You get used to it,” Vanya told him quietly, voice feeling hoarse from disuse. 'Total Eclipse of the Heart' was spilling out at a reasonable low volume from tactfully hidden speakers around the room, and Bonnie Tyler warbled at them about a love that was like a shadow on her, all of the time. Luther frowned as his gaze snapped to her, remembering that she was there.

“I am used to it,” he said. “I’m happy for her.”

“Are you really?”

“She’s my sister, too. Our sister. She’s allowed to love other people.”

Vanya watched him press his knuckles absently over the breast pocket of his tuxedo, kneading at the place where Allison’s mark was on him, and wondered if he even realized he was doing it. “Okay,” she said. Forever was a long time, and it had started for both of them a long time ago.

And Vanya wouldn’t see _any_ of these people again for another nine years.

After the wedding had wound itself down enough that politeness didn’t require her to stay Vanya went home and stripped down to the waist in her bathroom, stared at the ghost of herself in the water-spotted medicine cabinet mirror above the cracked porcelain sink: pale and listless face, dark hair that fell in tangles, and still the numeral stenciled between clavicle and left breast, bright as the night it had bloomed on her skin. They’d been old enough to be close, even then, and she’d snuck to his room to show him excitedly, popping open the first pearlescent button of her clean cotton sleep shirt and tugging the fabric as far to the side as she could to show him the outline of the number. There had been no vaguery in it, no way to be mistaken; only the childish, gleeful joy of sharing a secret.

They’d been ten, and hadn’t really known what it had meant when he’d kissed her perched on the edge of his bed, chaste and unpracticed, but she’d known it made her heart flutter when he grinned in the twilight shadow of his metropolitan bedroom and said, “Then you’ll always be with me. Forever.”

It hadn’t been a lie, Vanya considered. Just a braggart’s pronouncement he’d had no way of making good on.

Vanya traced the callused tips of her fingers down the swoop and curve of the brand, backwards in the mirror, meant to be seen there on her skin by someone else. They’d been old enough to have their marks by the time Mom was passing out names, which seemed in a way like a self-fulfilling prophecy; Luther and Allison had basically decided they were for each other before their first initials were set in stone and retroactively on their birth certificates. But there had never been the slightest doubt, for one second, about who held claim to Vanya’s heart, because what other parent would be cruel or careless enough to name a child “Number Five”? When Grace had turned her placidly cheerful, deathless smile upon her brother he had only straightened his spine and glanced sidelong at Vanya, waiting her place in line, and shaken his head.

“I already know who I am,” he’d said, with every evidence of pride in it. “You don’t need to tell me.” He’d never seemed ashamed of her, never disappointed; whenever, after yet another mission spent sidelined being told by their father that she wasn’t special, completely ordinary, that she was a waste of his time, whenever after that emotional buffeting she’d found Five and nuzzled up to him, all he’d ever say was “Of course you’re special. You’re mine.”

It had seemed such the compliment back then, when they’d been young and dumb and no one had taught her better. But it would have been nicer, maybe, to grow up thinking of herself not as an extension of Five, but as her own.

And Vanya thought of Luther again, his empty, champagne-glassy eyes tracing Allison in the arms of her husband around the dance floor, and thought of Five thirteen forever trapped by the self-fulfilling prophecy of names as The Boy, and of Five as he would have been as an adult, cruel and slick as a blade but hers to wield, and she opened the mirror, found her pills.

\---

It hadn’t been raining when they’d buried Ben.

Well, buried was a misnomer, a deliberate innuendo, a cloying euphemism to cover up-- there hadn’t been enough left over to bury. But they’d had the statue cast in bronze, with the very nice and hopeful platitude, and they’d all gathered in the courtyard to be somber for awhile, lethargic and dead-eyed and swaying in the wind like concussed zombies, dizzy and drunk with a horror and a grief you couldn’t compact small enough to fit inside the human mind. That was the first time Vanya had come close to feeling a spiritual kinship with Klaus, who had stood near the back of the garden popping pills through the short dedication and service. She’d wondered if his were better than hers, if he’d like to make a trade.

A part of Vanya knew that her pills were a crutch, that the dose was too high, that they left her drowsy and stumbling poleaxed half-awake through life, insulated against all sensation, but half-dead was better than whole-dead, and ‘numb’ still at least implied an ability, if buried, to feel. Vanya had stood in the thin warm spring sun looking up into Ben’s bronzed death mask and wondered about his soulmate, whose initials she didn’t know, and who would never have the opportunity to know their other half. She understood. Half-dead, half-awake, half-empty, lonely and yearning with no way to alleviate.

Maybe Five was dead, and that was why he hadn’t come back to her. Maybe he was trapped, in pain. Or maybe he’d gone somewhere better, where the unique wounds of their family situation couldn’t reach, and he was happy there, didn’t miss her. Vanya’s heart burned. She patted the statue’s cold, smooth knee, feeling Klaus’ kohl-rimmed eyes on her, bloodshot and watery, all the while.

It _was_ raining on the day of their father’s funeral. But before that she stood alone in the lavish living room, staring into the fire and the larger than life oil painting of Five that hung over it, and she could feel those eyes heavy on her back again.

“You want it?” Klaus asked.

She’d heard him coming down the stairs, pockets jangling with ill-gotten baubles of precious, age-tarnished metal, the greedy results of looting the tomb of their childhood home; he was leaning into the doorway now, framed by the dim refracted light of the hall and passing an ornate mahogany box absently around in his hands. He looked tired, but Klaus always looked tired, no matter how manic and wild his mannerisms. Vanya blinked at him, distracted out of a meditative stupor. “What?”

Klaus swaggered up beside her, tucked the box under one thin arm beneath his skunky patchwork overcoat, and tossed his tousled head towards the fireplace. “The Portrait of Dorian Hargreeves over there,” he said, and repeated, “You want it? I’ll help you get it down. The old man’s dead, thank _god_ , so you’re the only one left to do any mooning over him.”

Vanya turned back to the painting, considered it. There was Five, forever captured in canvas, forever thirteen, as perfect and small as the day he’d left her with that soft, enigmatic smile that suggested he knew a secret, and invited you to try to guess what it was. So many sleepless nights as a girl she’d crept down here, careful not to make the stairs creak, to fix them both a sandwich and eat hers while the coals of some old fire simmered to cold and ash, willing herself not to forget his face.

“I couldn’t,” she said, though really only some vague feeling of propriety was stopping her. She tried to picture the portrait incongruous in her hole in the wall apartment, beside the bookshelf where she could see it when she practiced her scales or, worse and more morosely, above her bed, and just entertaining the idea of it made her feel unbearably pathetic.

He shrugged fluidly. “Just as well, that thing gives me the creeps. And can you imagine trying to explain it to company? ‘Oh, don’t mind the giant picture of a Victorian waif, it’s just my dear kid brother who disappeared two decades ago. Definitely not haunted.’”

“Is it?” Vanya asked, suddenly as alarmed as she was capable of being these days, and it was Klaus’ turn for a ‘ _what?_ ’ “Haunted. The portrait.” She’d always avoided asking, in part because she knew Klaus hated it and in part because she was a coward, and afraid of the answer. If Five was dead, that made things final. ‘Closure’ implied a locked door, an end.

Klaus fished a hand-rolled cigarette from the dank recesses of his shirt sleeve and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “Not to my particular knowledge,” he said, and his voice had gotten a little soft. “But just look at that thing.”

Vanya did.

After awhile Klaus left her to it, the way she had once left him alone in the courtyard on a fine warm day.

\---

The next six hours felt like a dream, the kind of fantasy that Vanya had stopped allowing herself to have when she left home; it had a familiar plot but different, unfamiliar dialogue, and Vanya stumbled through the ensuing afternoon feeling like an actor who had been handed new pages and promptly forgotten all the lines, or an understudy in her own life who hadn’t paid enough attention to the blocking. The scenario went: _thunder! Lightning! Enter little Number Five, stage left, in a flash of blue light. End of act one._

There was Five, swimming in a shabby bureaucrat’s suit several sizes too big for him, tumbled face first into the wet leaf mulch of the unkempt garden-- the same face she would have known anywhere, the same cracking voice, the same comforting arrogance. Her heart knew him, and knew it was real, but the rest of her was pins and needles paralyzed, frozen without direction. She wanted to hug him. She wanted to grab his hand and feel his pulse and open herself up, spill every secret, and to hear everything from him in turn, wanted just to be alone together without their family complicating things.

Another part of her, the part that had lived for years on her own, learning herself without him, had no room left over for this development.

The first thing he wanted to do was fix himself a cup of coffee and a sandwich; Vanya was faintly proud, she still could have predicted that. The whole time he kept glancing at her, even as he orated vague prophecies of doom at their siblings, checking the way they’d always used to that she was still there, approving, following along, and Vanya just stared back, trying to figure out what in the hell was going on, actually. She listened to him talk about the shitty future, his failed calculations, Delores (“...Delores?”) and watched his hands holding the peanut butter slathered butter knife, and assimilated all this new information into her worldview.

And then, calmly and quietly, Vanya got up from the table, called herself a cab, and left before the funeral. Truly, there wasn’t anything else to say.

\---

She knew he was there in her apartment before she’d opened the door, though it was all dark in there, nothing outwardly disturbed. Call it intuition.

Five turned on the light. He was like a disappointed parent catching his teenage daughter sneaking in after hours, perched in her threadbare easy chair with the confidence of knowing he belonged there, and Vanya found, to her surprise, that she sort of resented him for it, that she would much rather he’d asked permission to be let into her life again.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, dropping her coat on a hook by the door.

He had the gracelessness to look surprised. “You left,” he said stiffly. “Without saying so.”

“Yeah, well.” Vanya crossed her arms around herself, needing the pressure against her ribs. She wanted to be angry with him, but under the shallow surface level of anger there was just numb, numb all the way down, like topsoil frozen in winter, and under that was the urge to run her fingers through his hair and lean in close enough to breathe in the familiar scent of his skin and feel the warmth of him through her hands until she thawed. “Guess that runs in the family, doesn’t it.”

Five didn’t flinch. He’d always been able to make himself very still, unnervingly, unnaturally still, and he sat and observed her with no discernible shame. “I made a mistake,” he said after what felt like a very long time, something he never would have admitted in a thousand years to anyone but someone who was essentially a part of himself. “I was punished for it.”

There was a spot of bright blood like a rusty lipstick kiss on the otherwise pristine crisp collar of his shirt, and dried blood smearing the back of his right hand; his hair was mussed and flyaway at the edges, his tie was on crooked. In every other respect he looked exactly the way Vanya had last seen him, perfectly preserved in the amber of time even as she’d grown older and damaged and worn. Vanya sunk down into the springless couch cushion, as far away on the upholstery from him as she could be. “So was I,” she said quietly.

“Vanya,” Five started, and her name in his reedy cracking voice still dragged a slow, lazy shiver up her spine, the forbidden thrill of recognition. The nails of his injured hand dug into the arm of the chair, slung with tension, and then at last he looked away from her. Finished, “I know.”

That was a different kind of acknowledgment, one she’d never really expected to get from anybody-- the tacit admission that her life had been hard, and loveless, and she hadn’t deserved it, and she was right to feel that way. It didn’t fix everything, but it flayed back a layer of necrotized grief, left only a healthy wound that they could dress together. “Stay there,” she said, pointedly, and disappeared into the bathroom to collect gauze and isopropyl alcohol and her bearings, willing her heart to slow from frantic arrhythmia.

When she came back Five was right where she left him, which her diminished sense of object permanence hadn’t trusted until she’d confirmed it, and he’d shed his Academy jacket over the back of the chair and rolled his sleeve up past the elbow to reveal a long shallow cut hastily patched with thin restaurant napkins. This time Vanya came in close, leaned in to gently take his wrist and arrange it between them while she soaked a tuft of cotton and drew it down the length of his wound, the alcohol fumes making her head swim, every movement slow and deliberate, never touching him directly. “What was it like?” she asked. “Loving someone else.”

Five made an unhappy noise. “Ah. Delores.”

“You mentioned her.”

“I did.” Vanya couldn’t meet his gaze, pretending to be absorbed in her task, but she felt him watching her, saw the muscles at the inside of his arm pull and contract as he flexed his fingers. “Do you really want to know?”

Vanya set the iron-tinged cotton swab away, took his cold, limp hand in hers. “No,” she admitted.

“You have to understand,” Five said, meaning, _I want you to understand_. “Where I went, there was just… nothing. Everything was gone. I searched for you in the ruins, but I was relieved not to find you there; it was a mercy.” Vanya made to pull her hands back, but this time he caught them in his own. He held her like a man, a boy, who was no longer used to the visceral feeling of human contact, who had learned to be feral and to fear touch. “Listen,” he said, harsh and quickly, “I know you were alone, but I was _alone_. I had nothing, and worse than nothing. Just my own mind and a department store mannequin for company. And I loved Delores, I treasured her, but Vanya-- she was just a reflection of you. Our life there and then was everything I had wanted _our_ life to be.”

You could cleanse external wounds with alcohol, but doing the same for old internal aches just reopened them, over and over again. Nevertheless, Vanya desperately wished for a fifth of the whiskey she hid with the brillo pads under the kitchen sink. “Then why didn’t you come back?”

“Don’t you think I tried?” he demanded. “Forty years of just… being half a person. Being lost, with nowhere else to go. I tried every god damned day.” He squeezed her hands until Vanya couldn’t feel them anymore. “I saw the future, and it wasn’t worth it. No part of it would have been worth it, if I couldn’t have come back to save you.”

She wanted a drink. She wanted a pill-- ‘take as needed’, it said on the label. Vanya wanted what was easy, not what was hard, the reassurance of coasting through a dead world without having to feel a thing. But she also wanted to keep holding his hand. This Five looked the same, sounded the same with the same strange pauses in diction, but he was a whole person now the same way she was, and she would have to learn, in equal measure, who he had become without her. And maybe someday they would be more than that again, joined together, all the richer and more splendid for it; maybe the music would swell like the moon-drunk ocean in her soul and they would fill up on each other, flush with power, trembling with love, building their world up bit by bit.

“Okay,” she said. “Tell me all about it.”


End file.
